🥶🏊♂️ Shortest and coldest swim of the year
George wishes everyone a happy new year! And, requests more liver treats
🎶 Top albums of 2024
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
According to my listening history, my top three albums of 2024 were:
I’m a bit surprised that Nonkeen snuck in there at #3. It is rather different from the other two.
📚 Year in books for 2024
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
2024 was another great year for books.
My favourite fiction book was Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Non-fiction was As Gods by Matthew Cobb.
![The Gulag Archipelago [Volume 1]](https://cdn.micro.blog/photos/300x/https%3A%2F%2Fbooks.google.com%2Fbooks%2Fcontent%3Fid%3DrffwDwAAQBAJ%26printsec%3Dfrontcover%26img%3D1%26zoom%3D5%26source%3Dgbs_api)
Finished reading: Translation State by Ann Leckie is another great book in the Imperial Radch series. I’ve enjoyed each one📚
Highlights of 2024
Friday, December 27, 2024
As 2024 comes to a close, a few personal highlights:
Welcoming George to our family
A recuperative cottage rental in Haliburton
Completing the Ironman 70.3 in Muskoka
I’m so grateful for these opportunities and memories.
Finished reading: I enjoyed the satirical futility of The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis 📚
Wednesday, December 25, 2024 →
🎄My family knows me well!
🐶 George meets snow
Finished reading: A Gathering of Shadows by V. E. Schwab is a fun second book of a great series. I’m looking forward to the next one📚
🔗 Cross-border Calvinball - Paul Wells
Careful what you wish for. Five minutes ago everyone was calling for a “Team Canada” approach to dealing with Donald Trump. Unfortunately our team would make the Bad News Bears look like Navy SEALs.
Good observations on Canada’s responses, so far, to Trump’s tariff threats
Wednesday, December 11, 2024 →
🔗 Apple Intelligence in iOS 18.2: A Deep Dive into Working with Siri and ChatGPT, Together
I’m aligned with Viticci here:
I think empowering LLMs to be “creative” with the goal of displacing artists is a mistake, and also a distraction – a glossy facade largely amounting to a party trick that gets boring fast and misses the bigger picture of how these AI tools may practically help us in the workplace, healthcare, biology, and other industries.
I could use the help with reducing busywork and letting me focus on the creative part. That’s what I’m looking forward to
George enjoys the fresh air, even at high speeds
After using the new Reeder for a couple of months I’m going to stick with it.
I like having all of my sources (RSS, Micro.blog, Mastodon, Bluesky, and podcasts) consolidated into one feed with easy gestures to tag as “read later” or open in a native app. The recent addition of folders was helpful, as I’ve created an “Attention” folder for anything I really don’t want to miss. Everything else is part of the river of updates and I don’t worry about completion.
One issue with the consolidation is that I’m following people across multiple services and seeing duplicate posts. I’ve been standardizing to their Micro.blog timelines, when available. This fragmentation across services is a common complaint and I expect I’ll be experimenting with different solutions. Now that we can so easily cross-post, we also need to manage our conversations. Recent updates to Micro.blog have been really helpful for this.
🚴 I’ve been having fun on Zwift
The most productive thing I’ll do all week: Organized the giant box of cables by taking out anything we no longer need, had no idea what is was for, or already had at least three backups. The photo is of the discard pile
🎧 20 album covers that shaped my musical preferences
Monday, December 2, 2024
Last month, I posted a series of album covers for music that shaped my preferences. The gimmick was that there was no context or explanation, just an album cover. Now, I’d like to provide a few notes.
As part of the overall framing, these are influential albums for me. They aren’t all necessarily my favourite albums by these artists or ones that I still listen to frequently. Rather, what I listen to and enjoy now, are strongly connected to these albums.
The list is also available on Album Whale, if that’s preferred.
- Led Zeppelin III: My Dad had this record (this will be a theme) and there was a dial you could turn that would rotate the images within the album art. That was cool. More than that. though, what an opening track! Immigrant Song just launches the whole album. Rock is my default genre (with an inclination towards alternative and indie) and that has to start with listening to Led Zeppelin as a kid.
- Tripping with Nils Frahm: Definitely my newest musical influence and it isn’t entirely accurate to pin it to this specific album. The reason I chose it, among all the rest, is the live performance. Part of the appeal, for me, is the musicianship and intricate assembly that comes across in the live, solo performance. There’s a whole thread of music from Nils Frahm, through Max Richter, Floating Points, Olafur Arnalds, and Jon Hopkins that I’m really enjoying these days.
- Pearl Jam, 10: Grunge is high school and that’s when lasting musical impressions get made. Of all the great bands that came out of the grunge scene (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains), Pearl Jam is the one that has stuck with me, even up to 2024 with the great Dark Matter album. Quite the legacy.
- Rush, Roll the Bones: My interest in Rush also starts from my Dad’s record collection. In this case, though, Roll the Bones is the first Rush album that I bought myself and, so, has special importance. I’ve consistently enjoyed their clever lyrics and impressive musicianship.
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Depeche Mode, Violator: Hard for me to believe that only a year separates this from Pearl Jam’s Ten. I listened to this album a lot and it leads to a long enjoyment of industrial music.
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Kate Bush, Hounds of Love: I don’t have an origin story for Kate Bush, her music just always seemed to be there: quirky, innovative, and captivating.
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Bjork, Homogenic: A spiritual successor to Kate Bush? Definitely exciting, creative, and beguiling.
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Peter Gabriel, So: Peter Gabriel has been a consistent favourite and introduced me to many great artists through his Real World record label. For me, this is his definitive album.
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Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon: Another one from my Dad’s record collection. How much more needs to be said about this album? An obvious classic that really emphasizes an album as a cohesive product, rather than a collection of songs.
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Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy: First of all, a great album. Second, I was listening to this at the same time as some heavy industrial and metal bands. This confused many of my friends, but reinforced, for me, the joy of diverse musical interests.
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Afro Celt Sound System, Volume 1: Sound Magic: Via Peter Gabriel, this was an exotic amalgamation of many musical styles and led me to an appreciation of what was then called “world music”. Although I think their third album is their best, this is more influential for me.
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The Tragically Hip, Up to Here: Iconic in Canada and helped me appreciate my nation’s history and stories. They followed up with three fantastic albums and then I mostly lost touch with their music until Gord Downie’s epic last tour.
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Supertramp, Breakfast in America: Another one from my Dad’s collection. At the core, it is their musicianship that drew me in and influenced my musical tastes.
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The Clash, London Calling: Perfectly captures the primal energy of punk rock.
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Massive Attack, Mezzanine: This one started my ongoing affection for bleak, creepy, and paranoid music.18. Yo La Tengo, I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One: Classic shoegaze and indie that is a clear theme of my current tastes. Yo La Tengo was a big part of early grad school which has lots of nostalgia for me.19. Ali Farka Toure, Talking Timbuktu: This sounded really fresh and exciting to me when it was released, especially when contrasted with the mostly industrial music I was listening to at the time.20. Rage Against the Machine: This was late high school and I was ready for music as social commentary, especially packaged as fierce, disciplined rebellion.
Finished reading: I really enjoyed The Farthest Shore by Ursula K. Le Guin. The Earthsea series is very good 📚
🏃♂️ Simultaneously ridiculous, inspiring, and intriguing
🔗 The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor // Bret Devereaux
I want to focus on rigid science fiction armors because they offer an interesting lens to consider their design: how to armor a human body in a rigid substance is an exceedingly solved problem: quite a few cultures have tackled this particular problem with a lot of energy and ingenuity, attempting to balance protection, mobility and weight. And the “problem with sci-fi body armor” begins with the fact that most of these futuristic ‘hardsuits’ utilize little of any of the design language of those efforts.